Melita
they should have checked the ashes
of the women they burned alive
of the women they burned alive
Maybe it hadn’t mattered and they wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it anyway. Maybe they’d all been sitting ducks in one way or another, heads in the sand or turned the opposite way. Maybe everything had been played and plagued to perfection, in onslaughts of terror and torment. Maybe they were just doomed to repeat lines of variations – disasters and ruins.
But Melita wouldn’t.
Seditious to a fault, the youth refused to give up and wallow and sink into the cindered ground or the charred earth.
Settling him for a moment into a chair, the youth adhered to her minimal task with swiftness, grabbing hold of a glass, filling it with the cool liquid, before returning to his side. There and then, at the very least, he’d be able to rid himself of some debacle, small and minute as it was. She extended it in offering, withholding her sigh, her own anger at the way the world had tilted again.
And she wanted to say something, anything, but didn’t know where to go. Something to alleviate, to mend, to soothe. But the honeybee had never been her mother or her sister, prone to compassion and gentleness – she’d been the embers and scorch marks. “Here,” she hastened instead, breaking into the silence.
But Melita wouldn’t.
Seditious to a fault, the youth refused to give up and wallow and sink into the cindered ground or the charred earth.
Settling him for a moment into a chair, the youth adhered to her minimal task with swiftness, grabbing hold of a glass, filling it with the cool liquid, before returning to his side. There and then, at the very least, he’d be able to rid himself of some debacle, small and minute as it was. She extended it in offering, withholding her sigh, her own anger at the way the world had tilted again.
And she wanted to say something, anything, but didn’t know where to go. Something to alleviate, to mend, to soothe. But the honeybee had never been her mother or her sister, prone to compassion and gentleness – she’d been the embers and scorch marks. “Here,” she hastened instead, breaking into the silence.
because it takes a single wild ember
to bring a whole wildfire to life
to bring a whole wildfire to life
